There will be usually some suspects among the channel users that are not actual conference participants. Those are called IRC bots and are kind of software that can run some automated scripts. The three most commonly found are zakim, RRSAgent and trackbot. They react to some commands they identify written on the text. You can learn more about the bots at:

Tracking Issues, Actions and Resolutions

The group uses a tool called Tracker to track actions, an issue, action and resolution tracking tool for W3C Groups, with Web, IRC and email interfaces; e.g. trackbot is the IRC bot. The Group's tracker Web interface is at: